BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Monday, April 12, 2004
SOMBER ANNIVERSARY.
Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden, an embed with the
Army's Third Infantry Division last year, has a terrific
"Radio
Diary" at the website for
the WBUR Radio program On Point.
Crittenden recalls riding through
the desert with the Atlantic Monthly's Michael Kelly and NBC
News's David Bloom. Within days, both would die, Kelly when a jeep in
which he was riding came under attack, Bloom of an embolism that was
probably caused by his cramped traveling conditions.
"It was not possible that Bloom and
Kelly could be dead and I would survive," Crittenden says. "I was
already dead. It just hadn't happened yet."
Crittenden also recalls his unit's
rolling into Baghdad and coming under fire - a moment when he called
out the positions of Iraqi gunners and thus helped US soldiers to
kill them. He
wrote about it
unapologetically, even defiantly, in the Herald last April.
Now he says of those doomed Iraqis:
I watched you die. Forgive
me. We all made our choices when we showed up for work that day.
It was your day to die. Not mine. But I remember you. I observe
the anniversary of your deaths and those of David Bloom and Michael
Kelly with the knowledge that this year of life has been a
gift.
Via Hub
Blog.
THE RETURN OF CLARIBEL
VENTURA. In the early days of the welfare-reform movement, there
was no more horrifying a symbol of dysfunctional dependency than
Claribel Ventura. It was a young Boston Globe reporter named
Charles Sennott - now a foreign correspondent - who helped make her
so.
Ventura, then a 26-year-old welfare
mother of six, was accused of scalding her four-year-old son's hands
with boiling water as punishment for eating her boyfriend's food. In
1994 Sennott checked in on her extended family, and found that it had
about 100 members, virtually none of them working, pulling in about
$1 million a year in government benefits.
It may be no exaggeration to say
that welfare reform might never have happened in Massachusetts
without Sennott's story. Indeed, the fact that the liberal
Globe would publish such a story was seen in some circles as a
sign that the political structure now had permission to try something
new.
Now Sennott, on a visit to Boston,
has tracked down Ventura in an effort to learn what he had wrought.
He writes
that Ventura's life today is a mixed success: after seven years in
prison, she appears to have kicked drugs, and has begun a new family.
Yet - not surprisingly - she remains consumed with bitterness and
resentment, especially toward him.
Sennott also notes that legislators
are threatening to cut funding for the drug treatment program that
helped Ventura put her life more or less in order.
The welfare-reform story is a
muddled one. Certainly ending the culture of dependency was
necessary. Yet the law's Draconian aspects - especially its emphasis
on low-paid work over education, which traps families in a cycle of
poverty - bespeak to shortsightedness on the part of then-governor
Bill Weld, who appeared to be more interested in scoring cheap
political points than anything else.
Claribel Ventura was a powerful
symbol. I even found an academic
article called "Bad Mothers
and Welfare Reform in Massachusetts: The Case of Claribel Ventura" in
a 1997 book, Feminism, Media & the Law.
Sennott reminds us that the symbol
he helped create is also a real person.
MORE SCALIA. Good Bob
Herbert column
in today's New York Times on Scaliagate. Even if Herbert does
seem to think that reporters have a constitutional right to record
Scalia's speeches. (They don't.)
posted at 8:58 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
